By Will James, Center for Health Journalism, July 2020

Covering homelessness puts reporters in the middle of a contradiction. On the West Coast, homelessness is so visible that it touches virtually everyone. But it can also feel like another world to which most people don’t have access.

Audiences take in so much information about homelessness, but at a distance or second-hand or filtered through politics or advocacy. It’s hard for many people to create a mental picture of this issue that incorporates all the contradictory information in a way that makes sense.

When we set out to make Outsiders, a multipart podcast chronicling unsheltered homelessness for one year in Olympia, Washington, we realized we had a chance to collapse some of that distance.

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